There’s a common narrative that’s bandied around about Robert Pattinson and his post-Twilight career trajectory. That narrative is that once Twilight ended its run with Breaking Dawn – Part 2 back in 2012 Robert Pattinson started pursuing weirder and weirder projects. But if you were to ask Pattinson himself, he’ll tell you Twilight was honestly pretty oddball.
In a recent interview, Robert Pattinson was asked about his trajectory in terms of acting in the time between Twilight and his upcoming movie The Batman. He actually said he was taking offbeat roles prior to Twilight and that he wishes the narrative around the vampire franchise actually pinpointed how bizarre the franchise is: Chewing through placenta, anyone?
Even before Twilight, I was doing weird stuff. And to be honest, I always thought Twilight was pretty weird. It’s really just the kind of marketing that made it mainstream. If you look at any interview I did, I would be pushing the chewing through placenta, any element which I could make gross, like I’d push and push and push it to the front. But you know you can’t compete with one guy against the whole marketing department going, ‘It’s a romantic odyssey, it’s beautiful.’ It’s like, ‘No, it’s disgusting [laughs].’
As much as “chewing through placenta” inspires vivid imagery thanks to Robert Pattinson’s comments to Indiewire, it’s worth noting that’s not the craziest thing that that happens within the five Twilight movies. There’s the whole imprinting subplot, where Jacob eventually ends up with the adult version of Renesmee after being in love with her mother.
Then there’s the fact that Bella ends up pregnant by her deceased partner Edward in the first place. And vampires in this universe not only exist, they are sparkly. It’s all weird, and I’m not saying that in a way that I feel people shouldn’t be into the weirdness. Heck, if Robert Pattinson got his way, all of the Twilight movies would have leaned harder into that weirdness.
To the credit of the producers, selling Twilight as an epic love (triangle) story to fans young and old seems to have worked out pretty well for the franchise. The five movies went on to make over $3.3 billion, yes with a ‘b’ at the worldwide box office. $1.9 billion or so was made domestically. Somehow, I feel if I sold these as the “sparkly placenta chewer” movies things may have gone a bit differently.
But it’s good to hear that Robert Pattinson was able to embrace the weird enough to enjoy playing Edward Cullen opposite Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan. In the time since, he’s taken his penchant for oddball roles to heart, notably appearing in David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, and Robert Eggers’ black-and-white psychological thriller The Lighthouse.
There’s also The Lost City of Z, that movie Robert Pattinson and Charlie Hunnam both had to diet and be miserable on to make themselves look like they were suffering in the jungle. So, you can kind of see why he’s earned this post-vampire reputation.
Meanwhile, I’d assume Robert Pattinson is eating quite a bit more these days to bulk up and play Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman, a flick which is currently in production. Twilight may be in the past these days, but he’s still certainly interested in playing popular characters… when the right projects come along. Following The Batman, he's set to do a romantic thriller. So we should continue to expect the unexpected from the actor in the time to come.
